{"id":7066275,"date":"2026-09-25T04:09:53","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/the-humble-history-of-the-bedpan\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T04:09:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T04:09:53","slug":"the-humble-history-of-the-bedpan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7066275","title":{"rendered":"The Humble History of the Bedpan"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Over the past few centuries, inventors have tweaked the design of the receptacles here and there, but overall, not much has changed about the dependable medical supply<\/h2>\n
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Leo DeLuca<\/a><\/p>\n

| Freelance writer<\/span><\/p>\n

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The story of the bedpan is about love and hate, germs and illness, dignity and shame, and, inherently, urine and feces.
\n Agustin Vai\/Getty Images<\/span>
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Eric Eakin has a three-bedroom house with more than 250 bathrooms. There\u2019s a white one with a tiny Richard Nixon head inside it. Another is decorated in colorful earth tones and adorned with feathers. One resembles a ukulele, complete with a neck, headstock and three steel-wire strings.<\/p>\n

In the basement of his family\u2019s Bay Village, Ohio, home, more than 250 bedpans\u2014containers used to collect urine or feces by those confined to a bed\u2014are nestled together in stacks, piled on the floor and lined up on makeshift shelves fashioned from concrete blocks and slabs of wood. Eakin\u2019s collection, believed to be the world\u2019s largest, has appeared on MTV and in Ripley\u2019s Believe It or Not!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I pissed away my savings. My collection is worth a lot of money,\u201d says Eakin. \u201cYou know why? \u2026 Because I got in at the bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Eric Eakin has more than 250 bedpans in the basement of his Bay Village, Ohio home.<\/p>\n

Eric Eakin<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Surprisingly, Eakin isn\u2019t alone. On August 10, 1988, the Country Today<\/em><\/a>, a newspaper based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, profiled Edith Martell, who displayed some 60 bedpans in an old henhouse on her property. Her favorite was painted with a chipmunk splashing beneath a waterfall. In nearby La Crosse, Wisconsin, Earl Lord<\/a>, a retired electrician, once amassed more than 200 bedpans. Lord and Eakin even traded Christmas cards.<\/p>\n

For Eakin, the collection began in the late 1960s, when his late mother, Elaine Harriet Weller Eakin, was gifted a bedpan as a going-away present from her prankster friends in Europe.<\/p>\n

Elaine later acquired a smaller, junior-size bedpan made by the British health retailer Boots. She displayed the little one in her small bathroom and the big one in her larger bathroom. Both were filled with plastic flowers.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe passed away, and I inherited two bedpans,\u201d says Eakin, matter-of-factly. \u201cAnd two is the start of any collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eakin knows exactly which bedpans started his collection. When the very first bedpan was used by humans, however, is impossible to say. But he has a theory.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first bedpan has to have been used when old Og tripped and broke his leg,\u201d says Eakin, using \u201cOg\u201d as a stand-in for some clumsy prehistoric human. \u201cWhen he was on the ground recovering, they must\u2019ve slipped a slab of bark or a big leaf under his hind end. They say that\u2019s the start of civilization\u2014when people stayed behind to help someone rather than leave them for dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea echoes a story<\/a> attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead<\/a>. When asked to identify the earliest sign of civilization, Mead supposedly<\/a> pointed to a healed femur. A broken leg would have left a prehistoric person unable to hunt, gather or flee danger. A healed bone, then, suggested that someone had stayed behind to care for them. Very civilized, indeed.<\/p>\n

Whether Mead told the story is unsubstantiated. But the idea has endured. Civilization is measured not only by what humans create, but by how they care for one another. And how they use their creations to care for one another, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe space of illness has radically changed over the decades, over the centuries even, but physiology has not,\u201d says Katherine Ott, curator in the division of science and medicine at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of American History<\/a>. \u201cThe basic need to evacuate what we eat and drink is still the same. And bedpans are still used and still disliked. They\u2019re still awkward and invasive.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while we will never know whether the world\u2019s first bedpan was a leaf, a piece of bark or something else entirely, its history is about much more than medical technology. It\u2019s about love and hate, germs and illness, dignity and shame, and, inherently, urine and feces.<\/p>\n\n

While Eric Eakin may beg to differ, a bedpan is not usually a family heirloom.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs very mundane, everyday objects, it\u2019s not surprising that there aren\u2019t very many examples of very old bedpans in museum collections,\u201d says Harriet Jackson, associate curator of medicine at London\u2019s Science Museum<\/a>. \u201cThey aren\u2019t the kind of objects that would have been treasured or passed down through the generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the bedpans that have survived, the Science Museum appears to preserve what may be the world\u2019s oldest<\/a>: a green earthenware vessel dating to the 16th or 17th century.<\/p>\n

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London’s Science Museum appears to preserve what may be the world\u2019s oldest<\/a>: a green earthenware vessel dating to the 16th or 17th century.<\/p>\n

Science & Society Picture Library\/SSPL\/Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt was originally discovered by the Ministry of Works during building works opposite Westminster Abbey<\/a> in 1951,\u201d says Jackson. \u201cThe area around Westminster Abbey has long been a site of religious and political power and home to various hospitals and alms houses, dating back to the Tudor period. The bedpan could potentially date back to one of these institutions, but with the information we have available it\u2019s difficult to say with any certainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

What we can say with certainty is that, as the decades passed, earthenware bedpans gave way to vessels made from materials such as brass, glass, porcelain and pewter.<\/p>\n\n

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George Washington’s pewter bedpan\u00a0is now preserved at Mount Vernon.<\/p>\n

George Washington’s Mount Vernon<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Of all the pewter bedpans in the world, perhaps the most famous belonged to George and Martha Washington<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Shortly after America\u2019s first president died on December 14, 1799, at age 67, his family\u2019s pewter pan was auctioned off. Martha Custis Peter, Washington\u2019s step-granddaughter, was the lucky winner. The vessel passed down through her family and is now preserved at Mount Vernon. (Maybe bedpans are family heirlooms, after all.)<\/p>\n

Once mislabeled a \u201cplate warmer,\u201d the Washingtons\u2019 bedpan is a fun oddity. But one woman in particular\u2014a willowy British nurse\u2014had a far more serious relationship with the device.<\/p>\n\n

Florence Nightingale, often called the founder of modern nursing, references \u201cutensils\u201d\u2014her term for bedpans\u2014numerous times in her famous 1859 book, Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is Not<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nightingale railed against using bedpans without lids, admonished nurses to clean them outside the sickroom and reprimanded her colleagues for leaving them unemptied.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf the fatal effects of the effluvia from the excreta, it would seem unnecessary to speak, were they not so constantly neglected,\u201d she wrote. \u201cConcealing the utensils behind the valance to the bed seems all the precaution which is thought necessary for safety.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Quick fact: How George Washington’s bedpan made its way back to Mount Vernon<\/p>\n